DRIVE A2B March 2018
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Overseas News<br />
ARIZONA<br />
Google’s autonomous driving company Waymo<br />
will soon make its official debut as a full-scale<br />
service on public streets. Arizona gave Waymo<br />
Transportation Network Company (TNC)<br />
status on January 24, <strong>2018</strong>. The company is<br />
assembling a fleet consisting of thousands of<br />
self-driving Chrysler Pacifica minivans.<br />
Waymo has been testing in Arizona since April<br />
2017, where select Phoenix residents were given<br />
24/7 access to the taxi service for free. The<br />
fleet is composed of Pacifica Hybrid models,<br />
which are actually plug-in hybrids that have<br />
an all-electric range of 33 miles. At first there<br />
were engineers in the driver’s seats, but starting<br />
in November 2017 the hailed vehicles were<br />
driverless.<br />
With its new TNC status, Waymo can start<br />
charging riders for its service, which will be<br />
accessed from a computer or an app. This could<br />
spell trouble for Uber, a company with serious<br />
self-driving aspirations of its own, and Lyft. This<br />
came prominently to light when Waymo filed a<br />
massive lawsuit against its rival. It accused Uber<br />
of stealing intellectual property relating to selfdriving<br />
technology.<br />
The conflict lasted over a year, and ended with<br />
the order for Uber to give Waymo a 0.34-percent<br />
equity stake in the company. At an estimated<br />
$72 billion value, Waymo’s settlement is worth<br />
close to a quarter of a billion dollars.<br />
UNITED ARAB<br />
EMIRATES<br />
A Middle Eastern taxi app has signed up<br />
almost 1,000 Saudi women for training in<br />
anticipation of the ban on women driving<br />
being lifted later this year.<br />
The new drivers have been hired by<br />
Careem, a UAE-based ride hailing<br />
company with millions of users in<br />
neighbouring Saudi Arabia.<br />
“We are very excited about this June, it is<br />
a big milestone for the country. We have<br />
already started training female [drivers]<br />
and we hope to get up to 100,000 on<br />
board within a year,” co-founder Magnus<br />
Olsson said in a recent interview.<br />
Saudi Arabia’s King Salman, at the behest<br />
of his son, Crown Prince Mohammed<br />
bin Salman, has issued a raft of royal<br />
decrees in recent months designed to<br />
liberalise some of the Islamic kingdom’s<br />
conservative laws.<br />
Public transport is basically non-existent<br />
in the Kingdom, which to date has given<br />
ride hailing apps such as Careem and<br />
Uber a captive market. Up to 70 per<br />
cent of Careem users in the country are<br />
women, and 80 per cent of Uber rides are<br />
ordered by women.<br />
Reuters<br />
36 <strong>DRIVE</strong> <strong>A2B</strong> magazine · <strong>March</strong> <strong>2018</strong>
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